Key points are not available for this paper at this time.
Recent developments in semantic theory, such as the work of Labov (1973) and Lakoff (1973), have brought into question the assumption that meanings are precise. It has been proposed that the meanings of all terms are to a lesser or greater degree vague, such that, the boundary of the application of a term is never a point but a region where the term gradually moves from being applicable to nonapplicable. Developments in fuzzy set theory have made it possible to offer a formal treat-ment of vagueness of natural language concepts. In this article, the proposition that natural language concepts are represented as fuzzy sets of meaning compo-nents and that language operators—adverbs, negative markers, and adjectives— can be considered as operators on fuzzy sets was assessed empirically. In a series of experiments, we explored the application of fuzzy set theory to the meaning of phrases such as very small, sort of large, and so on. In Experiment 1, subjects judged the applicability of the set of phrases to a set of squares of varying size. The results indicated that the group interpretation
Hersh et al. (Wed,) studied this question.